Abstract

Muslima between Projective Desire, Victim Role, and
Headscarf: A Current Stereotype Analysed(working
title)

A critical glance at the local media
shows that the current discussion on the situation of migrants from
Muslim cultures lacks constructiveness. Rather than offering broad and
differentiated reports about Islam and Muslims, media coverage in
Germany is mostly dominated by a narrow focus on negative aspects and
issues associated with conflict. These limitations hinder the formation
of an informed public opinion and foster hegemonic readings of the
national debate on immigration. The mass media may hence play a
pernicious role in conveying attitudes and behavioural intentions
towards ethnic minorities which may create and reinforce inequality.
This particularly affects Muslim women, who are assigned a doubly
disadvantaged social status: being both female and member of a
religious and cultural minority. This can delay, impede, or even block
the search for an adequate democratic dialogue.

The research focus of this PhD project
is an analysis of the phenomenology and specific manifestations of
stereotypes of Muslim women as possible expressions of Islamophobic
attitudes which may result in gender-specific discrimination and
exclusion. The project investigates stereotypes of Muslima in two
methodological steps: (I.) via an analysis of the broadsheet newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung and (II.) via a multi-level analysis of
inequalities by means of “Intersectionality”. This consecutive analysis
is used to investigate the complexity and entanglement of powerful
hegemonic structures of inequality (like race, class, gender and body)
that materialise on the level of structure, symbolic representations
and identity.

A reconstruction of current anti-Muslim
and gender-specific mechanisms of group focused enmity within a set of
stereotypes directed towards Muslima represents an example of
“extremism of the centre” (S. M. Lipset). It directs attention
explicitly to more subtle forms of anti-Muslim attitudes against Muslim
women in order to expose ideologies of inequality.

supervisor: Professor
Wilhelm Heitmeyer, Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict
and Violence